Fitness Apps: Week 18 (Google Fit, MyFitnessPal and MapMyRun)

It's been a good number of weeks since I last bored you with my experience of using fitness apps. So I thought it time to inflict a little more tedium upon you since there were a couple of landmarks this week: I bought my first pair of new exercising trainers in over a decade and I ran my first 15 km route.

Newwww shoooes

To explain, when I began running at the beginning of the year I simply pulled out my last pair of trainers and glued the soles back to the body and off I went. A zero cost beginning. It was fine, they've chugged along nicely for an elderly pair of trainers but finally it was time to admit there was only so much gluing I could do and so I bought my first pair of proper running shoes, ever!

Nothing extravagant or flashy but I'm really pleased with them, they fit snugly and give a bounce that's been missing. (For those interested, they are a pair of Adidas Duramo 6 trainers. I decided to stick with Adidas because that's what I had before and they'd served me well.)

From 0 to 15 km

It's taken me from December/January until May to build up from 0 km to 15 km of running. I guess if you average it out that's sort of building 3.75 km a month. But more helpful to know is that my average run is now 8.5 km rising to just over 15 km at the weekends.

Below is the chart of my week from MapMyRun.


I'd like to note that while I've kept relatively fit through my life by walking, and on and off cycling, I've never been anything close to sporty. I therefore make no claims of greatness on the speed side of things, but I'm really happy with the distances I'm achieving so far.

Energy on the go

The big change of reaching 15 km is that now I'm having to think about nutrition while I run, whereas up until now I've not even taken a water bottle.

I've read around doing distances in excess of 10 or 12 km and learnt that I needed to ingest some carbohydrates before I really was craving them. So I took a two-finger KitKat and a water pouch type bottle with me today.

The only thing you can do with the food is to eat in tiny nibbles as you run, but all seemed to go well. I'll probably upgrade to a four-finger bar or something else next time I do 15 km because I really was hungry by the end of the run. But this is a good start to take things even further and hopefully on to 20 km as my next goal.

MyFitnessPal

When I started using apps, MyFitnessPal was my go-to app. It's a great app and I'd recommend it to anyone, but I have to confess that having fallen within my BMI I've lapsed in my use and switched almost entirely to working with MapMyRun.

While I'd still like to lose a bit more weight, the discipline of using MyFitnessPal for four months has finally reduced my enthusiasm for food logging. I am therefore relying on the exercise and remaining sensible about the food I eat to help me going forwards, but if this is not enough I will go back to MyFitnessPal. I don't think it's a bad thing to take a break from the app, and it feels like I'm free to treat myself a bit more given the running as long as I don't use it as an excuse to over eat.

Google Fit

While GoogeFit can be a boost when it congratulates you for reaching your goal through walking, running or cycling, the most calorie burning exercise by far is running. So I've got the stage where I largely dismiss cycling and walking as a measure of my exercise. These are things I do for pleasure and to get places, and for some baseline fitness, not things I think are going to make a huge difference, at least not in the way I'm currently doing them. The app has therefore been pushed down the ranks in my day-to-day regime.

Conclusion

This is going to be the last time I post about fitness apps and my progress (is that the sound of cheers?) because I've hit a point where everything has just become part of my regular routine. Unless, of course, anyone out there wants to post me any fitness devices to trial either as a runner or as a developer (in which case get in touch on twitter as always). That, never works! But it's worth a try.


Endorse on Coderwall

Comments